Favoring China in the AI race
In a many-polar AI deployment scenario, a crucial challenge is to solve coordination problems between non-state actors: ensuring that companies don't cut corners, monitoring them, just to name a few challenges. And in many ways, China is better than western countries at solving coordination problems within their borders. For example, they can use their authority over companies as these tend to be state-owned or owned by some fund that is owned by a fund that is state owned. Could this mean that, in a many-polar scenario, we should favor China in the race to build AGI?
Of course, the benefits of China-internal coordination may be outweighed by the disadvantages of Chinese leadership in AI. But these disadvantages seem smaller in a many-polar world because many actors, not just the Chinese government, share ownership of the future.
Another advantage of Chinese leadership in AI: while right now they have less alignment research than the West, they may be better at scaling it up at crunch time: they have more control over what companies and people work on, a bigger government, and a better track record at pulling off major projects like controlling COVID and, well, large-scale 'social engineering'.